Tuesday

Jan.
7, 2003

Desert Places

Poem:
"Desert Places," by Robert
Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt and Co.).

It's the birthday of screenwriter and novelist William
Peter Blatty, born in New York City, New York (1928), who is best known
for this theological horror tale The Exorcist (1971). Blatty did not
start out as a horror writer. One of his early works was the screenplay for
A Shot in the Dark (1961), a farce starring Peter Sellers as the inept
detective, Inspector Closeau.

It's the anniversary of the first motion picture that was
made, in 1894, when Thomas Edison Studios filmed a comedian named Fred Ott
sneezing.

It's the birthday of landscape painter Albert
Bierstadt, born in Solingen, Germany (1830), who joined a survey team
in the American western frontier in 1859 and sketched the magnificent scenery
he witnessed, including the Rocky Mountains, the Yosemite Valley, and the Merced
River.

It's the birthday of cartoonist and illustrator Charles
Addams, born in Westfield, New Jersey (1912). Addams, the only child
of a well-to-do family, began drawing in high school, copying his favorite comic
strips, such as Krazy Kat. He attended three different colleges, each for only
one year, and then took a job lettering, drawing, and retouching photos for
Macfadden magazines for fifteen dollars a week. By 1935, he had a contract with
the New Yorker to draw cartoons for them; he also sold cartoons to Life,
Collier's, and Cosmopolitan. The cartoon that first made him famous
appeared in the January 14th issue of the New Yorker. It was a drawing
of a woman skier whose tracks pass on either side of the tree behind her; an
observer stares back in disbelief while the woman glides nonchalantly on. He
eventually drew more than 1300 cartoons for the magazine. 1937 marked the first
appearance of a cartoon that featured several members of a rather macabre group
of people known as the Addams Family. At first, Addams drew only Morticia and
Lurch, the family butler, who vaguely resembled Boris Karloff. Soon, he introduced
other family members, including Wednesday, Pugsley, Grandmama, and Thing. The
first book of his cartoons, Drawn and Quartered, was published in 1942,
which was followed by other titles including Addams and Evil (1947) and
Monster Rally (1950). In the early 1960s, a television producer approached
Addams about doing a situation comedy based on his characters. The Addams Family
television series was broadcast on ABC from September 1964 through September
1966, and the Charles Addams fan base expanded from thousands to millions.

It's the birthday of novelist, folklorist and anthropologist
Zora Neale
Hurston, born in Notasulga, Alabama (1891). When she was two years old,
her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, America's first incorporated all-black
town. Her father was a carpenter and preacher who was several times elected
mayor of their town. In 1920, she enrolled in Howard University and then attended
Barnard College in New York City. While in New York, Hurston published the "Eatonville
Anthology," a series of fourteen brief sketches, some only two paragraphs
long, including glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backwards
farmer, the greatest liar in the village, and a cheating husband. Her best work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written in just seven weeks and published
in 1937. She wrote her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, in 1942.
Although for a time she was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer
in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money.
She worked at odd jobs for the next ten years, writing a few magazine articles
every now and again. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed
and she was buried in an unmarked grave.

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Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse.
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